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“... writing, the thing that can be learnt on the campus, ‘the consequences’, as Philip Larkin put it, ‘of a cunning merger between poet, literary critic, and academic critic (three classes now notoriously indistinguishable)’. Gay Clifford was an academic, and by all accounts a brilliant and effective one, a lecturer in English at ...”

“... combed the cobwebs from our hair: the starship arrival of Blake Bailey’s authorised biography of Philip Roth, Philip Roth: The Biography. The ‘the’ of the subtitle said: accept no substitutes. Another biography of Roth was in the offing, Ira Nadel’s Philip Roth: A Counterlife, a ...”

“... as a promiscuously bisexual alcoholic. One memorable scene had John Updike, a friend and rival – Norman Mailer called Cheever and him ‘the Old Pretender and the Young Pretender of the New Yorker’ – ringing the doorbell and being answered by Cheever, bombed out of his mind and stark naked. Home before Dark struck some people as devotedly ...”

“... history researcher’, Kevin Baker, at the centre). Did the devil paint the picture, as Norman Mailer might have it, while God supplied the frame (or, since Mailer’s eschatology is not easy to decipher, was it the other way around)? Mailer, too, is having a love affair with America, but unsurprisingly he is entirely up-front about its ambivalent ...”

“... proof for Vidal that embellishment was what Capote was best at. Nor was he tremendously happy when Norman Mailer published The Naked and the Dead. He caught up, and in the seven years after 1945 wrote seven novels. He wasn’t satisfied with the first few. The one he likes least, In a Yellow Wood (1947), was written when he was briefly an editor at a New York ...”

“... to give up untrammelled power in England as he had by the loss of most of his French empire to Philip Augustus at the Battle of Bouvines the year before. The meadow had been selected by the barons because witenagemots had supposedly met there since King Alfred’s day – ‘Runny’ comes from the same root as ‘rune’ or ‘secret’. The drama of the ...”

“... less politically oriented in his criticism than some of his New York contemporaries (Irving Howe, Philip Rahv, Clement Greenberg), and certainly less dogmatic – this is one of the reasons he never found Partisan Review congenial. A little surprisingly, given Kazin’s temperamental prickliness versus Howe’s gentle, social-democratic disposition, you were ...”

“... account of the country house as lost arcadia. Lawrence and Baldwin both feature as guests of Philip Sassoon, although Baldwin – he was anxious to make the point – was not present when Sassoon was entertaining ‘ladies with painted toenails’. All the while, beside the new fast set, the old slow set kept up tradition, moving at a stately pace with ...”

“... Alvarez and Ted Hughes, along with Daniel Weissbort) to look for, and claim to find, a short cut. Philip Larkin’s art, not to speak of Basil Bunting’s or Norman MacCaig’s, was too intricate for them to master. There must be a simpler way! And, brilliantly, they found that there was indeed one such simpler model on ...”

“... that the future of music lay with electronics. In a letter from 1971 to the social philosopher Norman O. Brown, Cage compared writings by Fuller and McLuhan to a recent book by the French philosopher Jacques Ellul, most likely The Technological Society. Cage felt that Ellul’s stylish writing had turned the book into a ‘watertight work of art’, but ...”

“... obscured by the fog of booze, of their interpersonal ‘doings and undoings’ (expression of Mr Norman Podhoretz). Queenie Leavis of course became an official widow, and it is les veuves on whom David Laskin relies most heavily in this relatively orderly account of sexual and matrimonial chaos. Diana Trilling outlived Lionel by many a book; Mary McCarthy ...”

“... death. In the Sixties, Hannah Arendt was very Sixties. Her friends in America were of the Left – Philip Rahv, Mary McCarthy (her generous literary executor) and Dwight MacDonald – and she supported, usually with some individual overtone, the advanced causes of the era, from Castro to Vietnam. In the early Sixties she achieved a succès de scandale with her ...”

“... place in the 1060s, the work of the restless Normans. In the same decade, another branch of the Norman aristocracy annexed England, one of the richest and best organised kingdoms in Western Christendom, and eventually spread their conquests widely through neighbouring lands in Scotland and Ireland. These acquisitions were to prove a lasting source of ...”

“... is ‘graceless, awkward and taciturn’, ‘brutal, cunning and duplicitous’, while his son, Philip the Good, is a playboy prince, given to ‘dancing, feasting, jousting, hunting and fornication’. Philip is admitted to be a subtler politician and better diplomat than his father, but his role as an important ...”

“... The dissident Left – as opposed to the proto-Communist Left – symbolised by Dwight Macdonald, Philip Rahv and others. The Cold War hardliners, such as Melvyn Lasky, Irving Kristol, James Burnham, Sidney Hook and later Norman Podhoretz. The ‘End of Ideology’ liberal professoriat: Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Lewis ...”